Maharashtra Minority Affairs Minister, NCP’s Nawab Malik today launched a fresh salvo against RSS chief Mohan Bhagat on his statement on ‘two-child policy’. Taking a dig at the RSS supremo, Malik said that if Mohan Bhagwat wants to “forcefully” enforce vasectomy then PM Modi should enact a law for the same.
“Mohan Bhagwat ji wants a two-child law. He maybe doesn’t know that Maharashtra already has several laws on this and many other states also. Still if Bhagwat ji wants to forcefully do vasectomies then let Modiji make such a law. We saw in past what happened with this,” Malik said while speaking to news agency ANI.
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The NCP leader further added that there is a law in Maharashtra which states that no one having more than two children can contest the local government elections. They cannot get any recruitment in the government and they are not eligible for many government policies, said Malik.
While cautioning about the consequences of having such a law, the NCP leader, shockingly, delved into Congress’ dark history of state-sponsored population control, when it had coerced more than 60 lakh men into sterilization. He said: “We saw in the past what happened when vasectomy was implemented,” leaving one to wonder how Congress, who is now NCP’s alliance partner in Maharashtra, will react to this statement coming from a senior NCP leader.
For the uninitiated, during the 1975 Emergency – when civil liberties were suspended – Sanjay Gandhi, son of the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, began what was described by many as a “gruesome campaign” to sterilise poor men. There were reports of police cordoning off villages and virtually dragging the men to surgery. An astonishing 6.2 million Indian men were forcefully sterilised in just a year.
Nawab Malik’s statement was in retaliation to Mohan Bhagwat’s opinions on the issue of population control. Addressing a closed-door meeting with the senior volunteers of the organization at Moradabad Institute of Technology (MIT) on Friday, Bhagat spoke on a range of issues including the amended Citizenship Law and abrogation of Article 370.
While speaking on the adversities of the growing population in the country, the RSS chief had opined: ”We have been advocating this for quite some time now and want that the country should have a policy on the number of children a couple can have. But then it is for the Centre to take a call and decide whether it wants to enact a law on the issue”.
Several states in India, including Maharashtra, have two-child policy, which bars anyone with more than two children from contesting municipal and panchayat elections, getting government jobs and other benefits. The two-child policy is often seen in India through the prism of religion. Clerics of all hues and organizations claiming to represent specific religious communities have opposed the two-child policy.